Engineering, Science, and Society

“99.999999999% durability of objects over a given year”

2015 May 27

by Daniel Lakeland

Google Cloud storage claims “11 nines” of reliability in their storage. The earth is 4 billion years old, and has experienced about 5 mass extinction events. Google believes that if I put a picture of my cat in their cloud storage today, and then wait another 4 billion years, after 5 more mass extinctions, there’s a 96% chance I’ll still be able to access my cat picture?

If you put 1 billion cat pictures in google cloud and then wait 1 year, most likely you will have 1 billion cat pictures, but there’s a non-negligible chance that you will have a smoking crater where the Yellowstone Caldera now sits.